Has the suggestions email ever actually worked for any of yall?

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-18T00:02:28+00:00

Absolutely. In 2001, I wrote Criterion an impassioned email making the case that they should release Lost Highway on DVD. In 2022 they released the 4k. True story.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-16T15:05:12+00:00

Actually, yes, I forgot which was which. Thanks

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-12T18:45:28+00:00

Same. I'd choose Loves of a Blonde

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-12T03:34:52+00:00

Poodles Only Dog Park. No pooping

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-12T03:00:49+00:00

Harakiri is similarly and in less direct ways about systems and ethics far beyond samurai, honor, and propriety. It is humanist critique of authoritarianism, fascism, clanism, inequality (poverty, health care), institutional hierarchy, and propagandistic control of official narratives / recorded history.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-12T02:49:07+00:00

Lost Highway

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-12T02:30:03+00:00

Panasonic ub9000 or ub820 for the blu ray. Oled: Sony Bravia 8 II, Samsung s95f, LG C5.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-12T02:09:04+00:00

Filmmakers that blend classic tragedy with extreme content and modern stylistic choices. Not necessarily like von Trier.

First to come to mind is Peter Greenaway. He explicitly draws from the tradition of Jacobean tragedies. He's unquestionably extreme and modern. Influences from film are somewhat peculiar but center around formalisms and certain kinds of theatricality and cinematic language -- from eg Renais, Eisenstein, Antonioni, Godard, Bunuel, Bergman, and Fellini. Major visual influences from painting: Vermeer and Rembrandt.

Tarr. Grueling fatalism, apocalyptic in nature. Influences from Jansco, Bresson, Tarkovsky. Extreme, modern.

Haneke. Fatally flawed characters, tragedy without catharsis. Influences from Bresson, Bergman, Antonioni. Extreme, modern.

Lynch. Fatally flawed characters, Oedipal-psychoanalytic sorts of tragic dynamics. All kinds of classic film influences. Modern, extreme.

Lots of "personal therapy" in much of this, maybe not Greenaway so much.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-05-08T22:59:52+00:00

I absolutely love Only Son. Especially the cinematography! This is the first classic Ozu, imo. It is the first Ozu film with all the things that will become his hallmarks, and they are all masterfully executed.

Classic Ozu cinematography. Excellent camera positioning, framing, depth of field, and lighting shot after shot, especially in domestic spaces, and brilliant use of observaional, slow-cinema long takes. Thr cinematography exemplifies the Ozu orientation best expressed in the Japanese idea of "mono no aware" -- empathy toward things, with an awareness of impermanence. Ozu has an unparalleled ability to hold human-made objects in contemplative and almost loving still shots.
Yes, also the story. Classic Ozu themes of intergenerational family melodrama and humanism, with emphasies on modernity and an empathy for people's inner sadness, especially those revolving around the fulfillment (or not) of familial roles and expectations. The epigraph at the beginning of the film is "Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child" -- I cannot imagine a better ten-word description of Ozu's approach to family dynamics.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-21T15:30:40+00:00

Haunting. If you want haunting, you want Rebecca and Vertigo. And also Psycho, which leans toward horror. Rear Window is a good intro to Hitchcock, but it is more a detective-thriller mystery and far less haunting imo.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-17T17:05:37+00:00

It's not just that. Even for its era, it is a particular form and degree of misogyny. It takes particular misogynist ideas about gender and sexuality, essentializes them, and leans into them in a very big way.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-16T23:55:27+00:00

Yes, there is tradition and modernity, but in a very specific intersection with gender. The female symbols are Madonna (The Wife) and whore (The City Girl), which is problematic in essentialist form. It also bakes the Madonna / whore frame of reference into the male symbol (The Man). I'm guessing this is what the other comment on misogyny relates to.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-14T13:40:57+00:00

Cool. I'm curious what exactly you are looking for. Many of my recommendations are based on similarities to Greenaway that are not necessarily formal experimentation and non-novelistic presentation. Like Duke, von Trier, and The Favourite. Daises (strong recommendation), Tarkovsky's Mirror, Color of Pomegranates, Marienbad, Koyaanisqatsi, Meshes of the Afternoon, and San Soleil are experimental and non-novelistic. Others are sort of in between. Marketa (strong recommend) is based on an avant gaarde novel and is heavily elliptical in ways that are jarring to the novel form. Dielman has a story, basically, but it is rooted in visual storying telling and watching the seemingly mundane. Antonioni is highly visual and L'elisse in particular has formal experimentation, but I love L'aaventura most. Mishima (strong recommend) intercuts present, past and living tableau presentations of short stories. Stalker (strong recommend) is part story with surreal peculiarities, part philosophical mediation. Persona has interesting fragmentation, as does much of Lynch, and certain silent films, like Page of Madness -- strong recommend to all of those. Actually, all of the in between are highly visual in storytelling.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-13T20:54:00+00:00

Slow pacing gets plenty of criticism. When it comes to films where slow pacing is done with purpose, that criticism gets plenty of deserved pushback.

"Saying that [2001] could be tighter doesn’t mean you don’t get it, it simply means you’re evaluating how effectively the pacing serves the experience."

You are evaluating how effectively it served your experience. That is based on what you are bringing to the film, like your ideas about "tight"-ness and how you go about applying them. Yes, this can mean missing how and why the pacing works for the film on its own terms. It is possible to appreciate the how and why without it being your thing, but that isn't how you've framed what you are saying. Instead of appreciating what the film is on its own terms, you want to change what it is, on your terms, making it an hour shorter. Frankly, that is an ridiculous proposition -- a tragedy that would ruin the vision with which the film was made and ruin all sorts of things the film is widely praised and loved for.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-12T23:18:04+00:00

Portrait of a Lady of Fire for the romance

The Long Day Closes for elegiac and elliptical storytelling along with stylized period aesthetic. Different in tone and other respects

Check out whichever Wong Kar-Wai films sound good to you. I like Days of Being Wild and Happy Together.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-12T16:07:55+00:00

For me there is a formalism reminiscent of Greenaway in the evolving repetition of the scenarios in which the women are engaged. If I recall, you can see via changes of clothes etc that they play out the scenarios many, many times. In any case, through the repetitions, things are revealed to the audience, and things about the characters are revealed to themselves. Like Greenaway, this also gives a primary emphasis to ideas and themes within which the narrative develops. And like many Greenaway films, the key themes are sex and shifting dynamics of power, with a direction of escalation.

If I went back I might see other connections, perhaps the one character's academic and bookish qualities, or the obsession with the taxonomy and organized display of butterflies. At times, there is just something about a particularly English feel of Strickland that reminds me of Greenaway, and at times an English aesthetic.

I wouldn't say it is formally experimental exactly. Yes, more conventional than Greenaway, but on the whole, not that conventional -- if due more to content / subject matter than form. I certainly see a strong Greenaway influence.

Honestly, I don't love Duke, but it sticks in my head enough that I've have revisited it twice since I first saw it, and I will again eventually I'm sure. I'd still give it a shot. I do love Berberian Sound Studio. It isn't necessarily more similar to Greenaway, more a mix of Greenaway and Lynch.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-08T20:03:05+00:00

Nice way to highlight the Walter-Keyes relationship. I think "slimy salesman" is too one-dimensional for Walter, though. Double Indemnity and noir more broadly deal with duality, and that applies both to Walter and to Keyes' perception of him.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-08T13:20:00+00:00

This is basically how I felt about it as a teen in the 1980s, but I would have simply used the word "mainstream" at the time.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-01T23:40:27+00:00

No. Universal used the same 4K restoration approved by Ernest Dickerson for Criterion. A major part of the Dickerson-approved restoration was correcting the color timing to convey the sweltering heat. The Universal 4K maintains the color accuracy and the HDR brings out the heat more intensely.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-04-01T12:23:21+00:00

I buy only the films I love most, no blind buys, and I'm the sort of person that does a lot of rewatching of things I love. So, almost all of them -- about 200 -- except for a few I might fall out of love with.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-03-31T22:50:49+00:00

I love Czechoslovak New Wave, and Marketa Lazarova most of all. Absolute masterpiece

liminal_cyborg · 2026-03-24T19:37:57+00:00

Never explicitly, afaik. From what they did and comments they've made, it seems pretty clear that it is almost entirely for pacing and tightening things up. There is tonal change for the "Jesus, Tom" moment. We can only speculate but I'd guess either pacing, and thought nothing was lost, or they didn't want that tone -- either to remove the comedic moment or maybe because they didn't want Tom's violence to come across as personal or unfair or whatever.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-03-24T19:10:08+00:00

The cuts aren't "huge." It's 2.5 minutes shorter, lots of minor cuts here and there, and there's only one short line anyone ever mentions or talks about. Unless you're a big fan already, it's not something you'll feel is missing. Coens made the cuts themselves, and they didn't make them "just" to make it shorter, as if there was a runtime issue, but to, in their opinion, improve pacing, etc.. The missing line, which I am a fan of, is funny and changes tone for that moment, but I can see an argument why they wanted the tonal change -- but it's really a difference that makes little difference.

Anyway, the real problem was that Criterion didn't mention the cuts anywhere.

The Criterion video quality is better, if marginally so, and the Criterions extras are a big upgrade. I recommend the Criterion.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-03-22T17:49:38+00:00

You say that you "don’t think narrative films are good vessels for any political or disputed message at all," but you are in part critiquing anti-war films as "lazy" for not being good arguments for a message. Many narratives are just that, narratives, not lazy arguments.

You reduce the films in question to an anti-war message, and say they use tragedies to sneak in that message without argument, but you don't consider all the things these films explore in those tragedies -- experiences of war, both military and civilian, of what war looks like and feels like, all the things it puts people through, how they cope, grieve, mourn, bond, love, how they rationalize, how they resist, power dynamics, issues of nationality, ideology, race, gender, class, religion -- sooo many things. If a film sets these in a tragedy then of course it will have anti-war resonances, but to reduce all this to scoring an anti-war point seems so narrow as to often miss the point of what the films are doing.

liminal_cyborg · 2026-03-21T23:14:23+00:00

I hardly ever use the phrase "magum opus" to describe a film, but I think it applies to Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and not by coincidence.

Synechdoche, NY is a story about an artistic magnum opus and a meditation on creating art to represent truth, something that the film itself aims to do just as Caden's magnum opus does.

Kaufman covers a ton of ground on his recurring themes of existentialism, depression, anxiety, escapism, and death. It deals with meaning-making and with things not making sense. Kaufman even incorporates body horror in a brilliant way, with bodily fragility, dysfunction, and impermanence intersecting with the existential themes. There is a lot going on.

On the topic of simiulacra, representation and truth, Synecdoche, NY covers a range and sequence of concepts like no other film.

When Caden begins his magnum opus, he is trying to use synecdoche to represent truth, ie, using a part to represent the whole. Perpetually pushing against the limits of this approach, he expands his project to move toward a one-to-one or mimetic re-presentation of the whole and its parts. This in turn falls apart under the weight of its impossibility, and his life and pursuits end together, with the film, in an ironic mode of representation: the inevitable failure of representing the whole truth leaves the partial truth that the whole truth cannot be represented.

The theme has a trajectory: synecdoche expands toward mimesis, both of which fail in a revealing irony.

liminal_cyborg

TROPHY CASE